


The Shadows of a Bird's Wing

by Bird_Of_Scarlet, Unoriginal_Username



Category: Escape the Night (Web Series), Original Work
Genre: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, Friendship, Gen, and lots of screaming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 19:35:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16729422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bird_Of_Scarlet/pseuds/Bird_Of_Scarlet, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unoriginal_Username/pseuds/Unoriginal_Username
Summary: Two afterlife enthusiasts meet up.





	1. Isolation

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Voice Documentaries of Unoriginal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16648550) by [Unoriginal_Username](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unoriginal_Username/pseuds/Unoriginal_Username). 



Alina felt like she was choking on a gallon of crushed coals. Mostly because she was actually choking, and because her demon took her shadow aspirations way too far. 

No, seriously. She was  pretty sure after this entire experience she’s going to look like a morph suit. A black morph suit.

She was in the middle of a shadowy haze, a void that swirled around her. Unfortunately, it didn’t just do that, because of course it didn’t. Because evil cursed god corruption evil something I just wanted to watch s1 again but no.

She feels something pushing against her every move. She’s curled up in fetal position, but whenever she tried to do so much as lift a finger, something pushed it down again. Nevermind a leg, nevermind her head. She also felt the demon, invading her mind. She wasn’t sure what it looked like. All she knew was that it was female. Oh, and it had really really long black hair. The general theme was black, if that hadn't been established.

Could she not have gotten a demon of flowersor nice, happy animal friends?

Oh, and the voices hadn't gone away, even after her eventual corruption. The only difference was it was multifaceted, as if it was multiple people speaking at once except for some confusing reason it wasn't, and female.

How long has she been here for? A day or two? It feels like a year.

 

**_Desist._ **

**_Do not try to fight me._ **

**_You are weak._ **

**_You will all fall._ **

**_You will grovel before the Cursed God._ **

_Shut up, bitch._

Alina put every ounce of her being into fighting the monster. She was doing okay, as far as okay went. She wasn’t getting anywhere, but she was still breathing. She hadn’t faded away into a husk of nothing like the voice said she would. She wondered how it was like, for the others. Was it the same strenuous process? Or was it a different ordeal for every demon? She wouldn’t be surprised. If this was the same cursed god that caused all of the events of Escape the Night to happen thus far, she figured he’d want to put each guest through a nice little game of death. In this case, it felt like she was encased in thick ice that refroze instantly,  and had to try and fight through it. Whenever she managed to lift up a part on her, the part got forced (or, refrozen to keep up with the metaphor) onto the ground again. On top of trying to get ahold of her mind- which was slowly spiralling away from any of her control whatsoever- and that, she was starting to exhaust herself. But she knew she couldn’t let the shadows crush her. She had to restrain them. And she would keep fighting.

She would keep fighting until she was found.

By somebody.

Anybody.

She hoped Birdy was safe out there. She remembered that her friend been corrupted just like she had, though she hadn’t gotten a look. She wished right now that she could go back home, talk with her on Quotev, and forget this whole thing ever happened.

 

But that’s not reality. And reality sucks.

_ Roila forever,  _ she thinks as she looks up to the bleak, colourless sky.

 

\--

 

Everlock.

Teeming with monsters.

Corruption everywhere one could turn.

And a church stands high above it, across the bridge of the devil.

 

And on the roof of that church sits a bird.

 

Birdy had been freed from her songbird cage by Mystic and Chalala. Now, she was sitting on top of it unsure what to do. Mystic had been taken back by the Cursed God. She herself was possessed. Fully in control at the moment, sure, but she was still  _ possessed. _ She wished she could fly so she could scan the whole town without getting caught in less than a second. If the stupid god was going to make her into a mutant human-bird hybrid, he could have at least made her into a  _ flying  _ human-bird hybrid. As it was, her wings were functionally useless. 

Hurrah.

She wasn’t even sure how she was meant to get down. Why’d she get up in the first place?

Probably to try and mimic a Batman poster with a convenient flash of lightning.

She wasn’t even sure how she was meant to get anywhere. Surely his cronies would know now that she’d escaped and would be hunting for her. Her getup wasn’t exactly subtle, with her jet-black ragged (useless) wings and her leather mask.

 

So she thought like a pro and scanned the area.

 

And to her own utter surprise, she saw something. Glinting in the grass. It looked like a silver square, so it seemed like a good idea to pick it up.

 

_ Maybe I can fly. Maybe it was in me all along. _

It was not in her all along. 

She crash-landed to the ground with an unflattering squawk. Thankfully she hadn’t broken anything important, since the church wasn’t that big.

She staggered over to the silver square and picked it up, examining it curiously.

It was some type of voice recorder.

 

She hit the ‘play’ button. Because why wouldn’t you?

 

“My name is Alina, maybe better known as Unoriginal Username on AO3. I spent my time writing fanfictions about the afterlife. Now, I’m in Everlock.”

_ Crap. _

  
  
  



	2. Happy Accidents

HELP ME-

[Click.]

Birdy slowly brought down the voice recorder. She didn’t  _ want  _ to believe it. This situation was already sucking. Why on earth did  _ Unoriginal Username,  _ otherwise known as  _ Alina,  _ have to get dragged into the stupid mess? Of all people?

She wasn’t totally surprised. The Cursed God was going after everyone in the fandom, so naturally, everyone would be getting sucked into the void of hell that was the meta-world of Everlock. Still, she had hoped against hope.

_ Hope, you suck.  _ Birdy thought, as she paced aimlessly among the gravestones.

It wasn’t her most, ehm, practical decision. Since Unoriginal had been captured by a witch, and there was likely a manhunt going on for her, she probably had a big red bloody target on her back. But she didn’t care.

She had to help her friend.

Alina’s demon sounded terrifying. Sure, the stupid bird was inconvenient and stupid, but at least it wasn’t a murderous shadow lady who sounded like a nightmare child of the sorceress and Queen Chrysalis from  _ My Little Pony. _

La Ombra, she’d called herself.

It was a dumb name, too. 

She also had no idea what the demon looked like, which was… unhelpful.

Birdy looked over at the mausoleum. It was a good way off, right in the center of the massive graveyard. She hadn’t expected it to be so huge. It was definitely bigger than it was in the show. What if those were all the souls and lives the Cursed God had taken across his long career?

She shuddered.

So Unoriginal Username was in the mausoleum, probably. Her demon had said she was going to stay in there until she came to full power. But when was that? How long ago had this been recorded? The demon could be anywhere by now, and she would have no idea because La Ombra had thrown out the recorder. Bird sighed, slumping onto a gravestone. Then she snapped back up, realizing how disturbing that actually was. Then she slumped back again, thinking to herself;  _ Ah, fuck it. I’m part dead anyway. _

She once again used her amazing detective skills to assess the situation. She  _ could  _ go into the mausoleum, but that would be stupid if the demon was still in there. She couldn’t run into Everlock, because the people there knew that she was supposed to be a songbird in the Carnival Master’s fortress and they would bring her back immediately. And literally anything but that would be better.

She figured her best bet was to find out if Alina was still in the mausoleum. But how exactly was she going to do that? 

She looked it up and down. There was no way she’d be able to hear anything through the stone walls. She didn’t have the time or the patience to dig underneath it. Plus, she didn’t have a spoon or a shovel or a jackhammer.

Her eyes shot to the roof. It was what you’d expect from a super old mausoleum: a crumbly old thing with banged-up stone shingles. 

Wait… old and banged up? 

Maybe… maybe she could climb up. Maybe she could hear or see what was going on in there, maybe try to help her friend. It was a lot of maybes, maybes that she couldn’t necessarily afford. But as she scanned the area, she realized- it was her only chance to get to Alina.

She took a quick survey of the area. There was absolutely nothing around- just gravestones and the church which she wanted to avoid at all costs. She carefully tucked the silver voice recorder into her baggy black hoodie pocket. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt like it would be important.

Now, the matter of getting onto the roof.

She was  _ terrible  _ at P.E., so she naturally let out a loud groan.

Then she realized she was being hunted.

_ Whoops. Please don’t kill me, kind-not-really monsters. _

There were two gravestones placed on either side of the mausoleum. Maybe those could help in some way. Like, she could do that cool thing where you jump onto one gravestone and then launch onto the roof like a total pro!

_ Let’s do this, Birdy. You got this. You totally got this. _

She carefully clambered up onto the gravestone on the right side because a) it was a little taller and b) the other one’s top was shaped like a cross so that kind of negated the option.

_ Be brave. You can do it. You’re coming to help your friend. _

Taking a shaky breath, she quite simply threw herself onto the roof of the mausoleum, making screaming cat noises the entire way.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a brilliant tactical plan. Or much of a plan in the first place, but hey, when did she ever plan anything? 

The 70s AU and all its little details flashed through her mind.

_ Okay _ , she rephrased internally. When did she ever plan anything she did in real life when it wasn’t something she could meticulously control? 

_ True, true. _

Exactly- and she’s talking to herself again. 

_ You already do that a lot. _

_ “I know.” _ she muttered aloud. Anyway, back to the whole town of death, demons and despair.  _ Joy. _

Screaming cat cream, dramatic flail-jump- and Birdy found herself dangling precariously from the mausoleum roof. She’d give herself a high-five for making it this far if it weren’t for the fact if she did she’d probably die by falling and bonking her head off a grave stone.

_ Killed by a death marker. Ironic. Ahahahahahahaha. Ah. Ahah. _

Then she realized she had two options- death by a death-marker, or desperately scrambling her way up to the roof and figuring it out from there. She didn’t want to die, so she chose option B.

Breath coming out in short, panicky gasps, she carefully clawed her way up the mausoleum roof, not daring to lift a hand for anything except moving up to another shingle and pulling herself a little higher. She realized that if this place didn’t kill her, the precarious climb would. She also realized about five minutes too late that this had been maybe the worst idea ever conceived.

_ Welp, too late now! _

After a gazillion years (which roughly translated to maybe two or three minutes of work) Birdy managed to pull her legs, one after the other, onto the roof. Though the kept one hand firmly planted on a shingle right near the top of the roof, she gave herself a moment to pant loudly and want to cry about how now she was on a really damn big building and she had virtually no idea how to get down.

Then her hand slipped.

She screamed loudly for like the fiftieth time (how on earth had she not been found out yet) and wildly clawed out for another one to grab onto. Inadvertently, in her scramble, her legs kicked out- and knocked some of the shingles clean off the roof, leaving a gaping hole.

Hopefully nobody really cared about that mausoleum.

She heard a scream of agony. She figured it was coming from her own throat, until she had an epiphany and realized that she pretty much controlled whether she screamed or not (not really, but hey) and at the moment all the sound she was making was terrified, exhausted pants. The scream sounded like it was coming from underneath her, so-

There was someone in the mausoleum.

The demon.

_ Alina. _

In her shock, she  _ actually  _ lost her grip this time and plummeted like a very squawky cannon onto the wet grass.

Thankfully, by some stroke of luck, she didn’t get fatally bopped/impaled by a gravestone. She just might’ve broke her butt.

She lay on the ground for a few seconds, looking up at the sky and contemplating if this was what normally happened when people wrote fanfiction. After a solid two seconds of complex math, her final answer was  _ no. _

**_“You…”_ **

Birdy sat straight up, looking around frantically. She scrambled to her knees, turned around to the mausoleum door, and was greeted with quite possibly the freakiest thing she’d ever seen.

A… thing was staggering out of the mausoleum. It had a vaguely human, female form, but it was hunched over, weak, decomposed. It had incredibly dark gray skin. Billowing black clouds emitted off of it, almost like smoke, except not really because it had neither the smell nor the choke factor. It had super long, jet-black, stringy hair, and wore a long black dress with a choker. When it looked up… Birdy was faced with the most horrifying pair of yellow eyes she’d ever seen.

**_“You… incompetent fool! How… how dare you disturb my ritual… I was about to gain control of this pathetic mortal mind! Your incessant… Your foolish attempts… The moonlight…”_ **

Birdy realized- this, this  _ thing…  _ staggering in front of her was La Ombra, the very demon who’d she’d listened to just a little while ago on the voice recorder. She was a demon of pure shadow, and she’d been hiding in the pitch-black mausoleum to regain her full power… and full control over Alina. 

That moonlight, the moonlight  _ she’d  _ let in through her pure incompetence, seemed to have weakened her significantly.

She might’ve just saved her friend’s life.

_ Chock one up for me! Woop! _

**_“No matter… you cannot stand up against me, you petulant fool. I will rip you to shreds, then sprinkle those shreds at the feet of my master!”_ **

La Ombra threw her hands to the sky, a wildly murderous look in her eyes. However, before she could do some freaky shadow curse or turn her into a toad or whatever the heck she was planning on doing, something almost seemed to break in her murderous stare. Her hands, her expression, everything snapped frozen. Her pupils shrank.

**_“You… you! No.. no, how is this possible, I crushed you, ho-”_ **

Whatever she was going to say was cut off by, apparently, the world’s most painful migraine. She started to shake. Her hands flew to her head as she clutched it, screaming ravenously about bloody murder and death and curses upon her family or whatever those incoherent noises were. She staggered a few steps, eyes the size of golf balls, before letting out a final agonized cry and crumpling on the ground into a jet-black heap.

Birdy, who had been curled up, hoping not to get Thanosed or killed or anything along those lines, carefully lowered her hands from her face.

La Ombra was lying still as a stone on the ground.

She carefully crawled on her hands and knees towards the demon.

Then, idiotically,she reached out a finger, and poked her back.

She shot upright, looking around, panicky.

“Wh-where am I? What’s happening?” She whirled around, immediately jumping back, terrified, as she saw Birdy.

Birdy took offense. Then she realized she looked like a total freakazoid.

The demon seemed so different than what it- no,  _ she,  _ had been two second ago. Instead of intimidating, angry, evil, and, well… demon-y… she just seemed scared and confused, like a lost puppy. Her voice had changed as well- it lost its horrible, two-voices-speaking-as-one quality. It now sounded like the voice of… a girl, quite simply. A normal girl.

_ Is it… _

“Who… who the hell are you? And I.. um… totally have evil powers, so I’ll, uh… kill you! Yeah!”

She held up her hands in a not-at-all intimidating gesture. Then she realized this was a failure and put said hands down.

Birdy coughed, and smiled.

“Birdy. Bird_of_Scarlet,”  She said with an uncertain smile. “Who… who are you?”

In a split second, her terrified grimace melted away into a huge smile. 

“I’m Alina.”

They spent a few solid seconds in disbelieving silence.

Birdy couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten this lucky.

“WOOP!” She yelled, making a fist and punching it to the sky. In her mind, she silently imagined it was the Cursed God’s face that her fist hit.

Then she, quite simply, yeeted herself at Alina in the first hug she’d given in about way too many hours. They were both loudly shouting about things, but it was such a happy moment in the middle of a horrible world that those things didn’t really matter until shit started getting serious again. But at least for now, it wasn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is technically a prequel fanfiction leading up to the fates of our dynamic duo in Our Eternity Together. It'll make more sense going forward.


End file.
